The Midnight Hour

by R. G. Belsky

  “Because my brother had talked to me about other men being with Kathleen.”

  “What other men?”

  “He was never sure. But I know that he believed she was cheating on him with someone. He was very upset about this in the days before the murders. He and Kathleen had had some really bad arguments. The police found out, of course, and said it was just more of a motive for murder. But they didn’t know Tom. He never would have hurt Kathleen. He loved her. He wanted to make the marriage work. Whatever was bothering her, he wanted to find out what it was and fix the problem. He just never got the chance.”

  CHAPTER 13

  At 6 a.m. I was sitting in a parked car in front of Mitchell Aldrich’s apartment house in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan.

  Aldrich was the one constant I’d discovered so far in all of this. So I decided to follow his trail and see where it took me.

  At 6:45 a.m., Aldrich emerged from his building wearing a red jogging suit. It was made of expensive silk with white piping down the side and a crest on the front from a designer or a yacht club or something. Aldrich was also wearing Nike running shoes, expensive-looking wraparound sunglasses, and a designer sweatband on his head. He looked good.

  He jogged around Gramercy Park for the next thirty minutes. Since the park only covers one city block, I didn’t have to move much to keep an eye on him. I just sat there in my car, sipping coffee and watching him go around and around the park for his laps.

  At 8:30 he emerged again from the building—this time wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase. A limousine was waiting for him at the door. I followed him through the morning traffic to his office building on Forty-First Street and Park Avenue. He went inside a little before 9 a.m.

  I waited outside until lunchtime when he came out the front door again with two other men. They went to a French restaurant on Madison Avenue, where they remained for two hours and fifteen minutes. Then Aldrich returned to his office again until 5:30 p.m. I followed him back to Gramercy Park and sat outside of his building until 9:45 when I decided he was in for the night and then went home.

  The next two days were pretty much the same routine. Jogging. Business meetings. Lunches. Home to Gramercy Park. One night he and a middle-aged woman, who I assumed was his wife, went to dinner in Chinatown together.

  Another time he had a drink after work with a young blond woman who was definitely not his wife. Several times he reached over and touched her. At one point I saw them kissing at the bar. You didn’t have to be a brilliant reporter like me to figure out what was going on. But all it meant was that Mitchell Aldrich was a player. Not necessarily a murderer.

  On the fourth day, Aldrich did something different. He went to lunch with several people at a restaurant on Fifty-Third Street, but said goodbye to them in front of the restaurant. He waited there by himself for a few minutes, then hailed a cab. He rode across town to Columbus Circle, where he got out and sat down on a bench with a newspaper. He pretended to read it while watching the traffic on the street in front of him.

  I took up a position about a hundred feet away and waited for something to happen.

  Ten minutes later, a black limousine—not the one that normally picked up Aldrich at his house—pulled up to the curb in front of him. Aldrich stood up, walked over, and said a few words to someone inside the car. Then he got inside, and the limo pulled away into the midtown traffic.

  I’d parked my own car nearby in case I needed it in a hurry. I jumped in and followed the black limo. The limo headed up Central Park West, then turned into the park at the Seventy-Second Street traverse. It drove east for a few minutes, then pulled off into a parking lot near a restaurant on the other side of the park.

  I pulled into the restaurant lot, parked a short distance away, and watched the limo in my rearview mirror. It just sat there without any apparent movement from the people inside. Finally, it began moving again. It pulled out of the lot and went east through the park, eventually onto Park Avenue and then south toward Forty-First Street where Aldrich’s office is. He got out there and went inside. I watched to make sure he went in the front door, then followed the black limo as it continued south downtown.

  The limo eventually pulled up in front of a familiar building in lower Manhattan.

  I knew what it was because I’d been there before.

  The district attorney’s office.

  Jack Keegan got out of the car and went inside.

  CHAPTER 14

  Susan has told me all about you,” Keegan said. “She said you think you’re a wiseguy, you act like a jerk a lot of the time, and you’re generally pretty much an all-around pain in the ass.”

  “Well, we were married,” I pointed out.

  “She also said that you were the most trustworthy, the most fair, and the most ethical journalist she’d ever seen.”

  “I do the best I can,” I said.

  I had sent a message to Keegan after that day in the park that said simply: “I know all about you and Mitchell Aldrich.” I didn’t really know all that much, of course, but I figured that might be enough to shake him up. It was. He asked me to come meet privately with him in his office. The office was filled with plaques, pictures, and other mementoes of his legendary crime fighting career. But Jack Keegan didn’t look like a tough crime buster now. He just looked sad.

  “Tomorrow morning there will be a press conference downstairs,” he told me. “At it, I will announce my resignation as district attorney. I will also admit that I have committed acts that were unethical—perhaps criminal—and violated the oath, standards, and dignity of this office.”

  I stared at him in amazement.

  “But I won’t tell the whole story tomorrow. So I’m going to tell it to you now. I think you deserve to hear it. I don’t know exactly how much you know already, but I want to be sure no more innocent people get hurt, Mr. Malloy.”

  “What really happened in Logan Point?”

  • • •

  It had been a juicy assignment for a young and ambitious FBI agent, Keegan said. The case of Thomas Gallagher and the massacre of his family had made national news all over the country.

  From the very beginning, he said, he never had a doubt that Tom Gallagher had committed the murders. Everything pointed to Gallagher. Evidence. Testimony from witnesses. His lack of a credible alibi. Christ, the guy was found sitting next to his wife’s body holding the bloody knife that killed her.

  So it was no big deal when he was told that people wanted him to come to a quick conclusion on the case.

  “Was Mitchell Aldrich the person who wanted you to wrap it up so quickly?”

  “He put some pressure on me, yes.”

  “Did you know he was having an affair with the dead woman?”

  “Not at the time.”

  “If you did, would it have changed your opinion about the case?”

  “Not really. I’m sure I would have looked into such an angle. But I still believed Gallagher did it. That was the bottom line.”

  “And you weren’t suspicious at all of Aldrich’s motives?”

  “I thought he was just concerned about a long, messy scandal ruining the image of the school and all the things he’d accomplished there. He simply wanted to get it over with quickly.”

  “And after you found out years later that Gallagher didn’t do it?”

  Keegan grimaced and I suddenly realized the pain he’d been living with all these years.

  “I’ve gone over it in my head a million times,” he said. “Yes, the evidence against Gallagher was all there. Yes, everyone thought he did it. Yes, it seemed like an open-and-shut case to everyone at the time. No one ever blamed me for what happened. I keep telling myself that nothing I could have done back then would have made any difference in stopping Gallagher from being executed. But I guess I’ve never been able to fully convince myself. I
should have asked more questions, I should have been more skeptical about some of the evidence, I should have seen some of the things that I missed. I could have saved Tom Gallagher’s life and maybe caught the real murderer of that poor family, too. But I didn’t. I was too concerned about . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “What was the deal between you and Aldrich?” I asked him.

  “I never did anything that was actually corrupt. I didn’t take any money. I didn’t steal anything. I didn’t do anything that was really wrong myself. What was wrong was not what I did—it’s what I didn’t do.”

  “You knew Mitchell Aldrich was involved in corruption and never went after him.”

  Keegan didn’t answer me.

  “You just looked the other way.”

  “For a long, long time,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Sometimes when a man hangs on to a story for a long time, he welcomes the opportunity to finally tell it. Once he starts, he can’t stop until he tells the whole thing and exorcises whatever demons have been living inside him for so long. That’s what happened with Jack Keegan, I guess. He had been living with this since 1985. It was finally time to let it go.

  “You have to understand something,” he said, speaking so softly that I could barely hear him. “Back then, my wife and I wanted a child so much. Ever since we were first married, we’d tried to start a family—but nothing ever happened. The doctors finally said they didn’t think my wife could ever have a baby. It was devastating news to us. We were getting older, this was long before anyone knew a lot about sperm banks and test tube babies, and we didn’t know what to do. The adoption process was long and complicated, with so many more applicants than there were available babies. We had just about given up hope when I got the assignment in Logan Point. And then suddenly there was this baby. This beautiful little baby girl. No family anymore. She was the answer to our prayers, and we were the answer to hers. That’s where Aldrich comes in. He helped us, he talked to some people . . .”

  “Lauren Gallagher,” I said.

  And then suddenly it all made sense to me.

  “My daughter Christine is Lauren Gallagher,” Keegan said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Jack Keegan told his story to everyone at a press conference the next day. Not all of it though. Not about Christine. He admitted that he had done favors for Mitchell Aldrich while in office, but didn’t say why. He simply told reporters that he was resigning as district attorney because of this and he understood he might face criminal charges.

  That was the way I had written it, too, in an exclusive story for the Daily News that broke the news first. He had told me during the interview in his office that Christine still didn’t know the truth about her birth.

  “I want to tell her about it myself,” he said. “I don’t want her to hear about it at a press conference. But I have to resign first. Then I’ll talk to Christine and tell her everything. I just don’t want her dragged along with me through the public eye in all this.”

  I thought it was a classy, stand-up thing for a father to do. I tried to reconcile that with the image of the father who told Christine she should “just like boys, like her sister did.” I couldn’t. None of us is perfect, I guess. But sometimes, like Jack Keegan now, we have stand-up moments when we do the right thing.

  I didn’t tell anyone else—not even my boss, Marilyn Staley—about it.

  “Why do you think Keegan would do all those things for Aldrich?” she asked me at one point. “Is it all about money?”

  “Beats me,” I said.

  I knew that as a reporter I had an obligation to tell the whole truth. Not just to Marilyn Staley, but to the readers too.

  But I’d given my word to Keegan that I wouldn’t do that, in return for him telling me everything.

  And—despite my own checkered past with the Houston story—the truth was still very important to me.

  Sometimes I have my own stand-up moments.

  • • •

  “Getting the baby was something that just happened,” Keegan said to me that first day we met in his office. “I got to know Aldrich pretty well while I was there. We talked about a lot of things. His political ambitions at the time. My desire to go to law school. Eventually we got around to some personal stuff. I told him how badly my wife and I wanted to have a baby. And all we’d gone through to try and make that happen. He was very sympathetic.”

  I remembered Aldrich telling me the same things.

  “This guy James Lowell was a friend of his. I guess Lowell wanted to run for office and Aldrich had the clout to get him nominated and then help with the fund-raising. I didn’t know all this then, of course. All I knew is that Aldrich came to me one day and said that Lowell could get me a baby. The baby that had been left behind in the murders. I knew it seemed too easy, but I didn’t think I was doing anything really wrong. Or at least I convinced myself of that. I mean Lowell was the head of the child services agency, so he had the authority to make that kind of decision. In any case, when my wife and I saw the baby we knew we wanted her so badly.

  “I was never sure exactly why Aldrich did that for me. I mean I knew he wanted to get it wrapped quickly with as little complication as possible for the sake of the university—and most of all, for his sake and for his future. And I think he’s the kind of guy that always likes to have that extra edge in a relationship—to have people owe him favors. Either political or like mine. Just in case he ever needs to call those favors in. But what he did really made no difference. I already thought Gallagher was guilty. All the evidence at the time pointed that way. I never did any kind of quid pro quo for getting the baby—and nothing was asked or promised. Not then anyway. All of that came later.

  “Like I said before, I told myself that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It really did seem like an open-and-shut case. I thought Tom Gallagher was guilty just like everyone else did. There was no way that I could have figured out he didn’t do it—even if I’d investigated longer or asked more questions. That’s what I kept trying to convince myself of for years afterward anyway. Now though I’m not so sure. Now I wonder if maybe my priorities were out of whack, and whether that affected my judgment.”

  The pressure began slowly, he said. One day, when Christine was still very young, Aldrich asked him to do a favor. That’s when Aldrich first told him that the baby adoption hadn’t been strictly legal. The unspoken threat, of course, was that Aldrich might reveal how their baby had been obtained—and they would lose Christine.

  At the time it didn’t seem like a big favor that Aldrich wanted. Thomas Gallagher appeared to be guilty. But the minute he did that favor for Aldrich, he set off a domino-like series of events that was about to culminate in a disgraced departure from the job he loved.

  At first, it was the adoption that Aldrich held over him. Then the favors themselves became a kind of blackmail. Eventually he was in so deep that he had no way of ever getting out. Aldrich didn’t ask for a lot of favors. A phone call to an influential city leader once in a while. Advance warning on some corruption crackdown that might affect his businesses. Special consideration on city construction projects.

  After a while, Keegan said, it was something he almost learned to live with. Almost.

  And then, seven years after they got Christine, another wonderful thing happened: his wife finally got pregnant with Dani. “It was like a miracle from God,” Keegan said. “We had these two lovely daughters that we never thought we would be able to have.”

  “I never wanted Christine to know she was adopted; I loved her so much, just like I loved Dani. But now I’ve lost Dani, and I fear I will lose Christine too—in a different way. I need to make things right between us. I can deal with losing my job, but not with losing both of my daughters. That’s why I need to tell Christine this story in my own way, at my own time. I don’t want her to find out by r
eading a newspaper.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I needed a place to go next. Despite everything I’d uncovered so far, I still didn’t know who massacred the Gallagher family or who killed Dani. And whether or not that was the same person.

  Sitting in the newsroom, I looked over at Dani’s desk and her computer still sitting atop it.

  “How can I get into Dani’s computer?” I asked Zach Heller, an assistant city editor.

  “Why do you want to get into Dani’s computer?”

  “I asked you how, not why.”

  “The regulations are very clear. Every reporter’s password is private and no one else is allowed access . . .”

  “She’s dead, Zach.”

  Heller was one of those by-the-book types who never varied from the company line. It made him a decent enough assistant city editor who could, as they say, make the trains run on time. But he’d never be a real journalist because he didn’t have that reporter’s instinct—that ability to go for the jugular—you need in this business. It took me a bit of haranguing before I finally convinced him to agree to obtain Dani’s password from the IT people. I have this innate ability to persuade people to do things they normally wouldn’t do when I’m on a big story. Or maybe they just give up, willing to do anything to shut me up. Whatever.

  While I waited for him to find out, I grabbed a bunch of papers from Dani’s desk and drawers, put them in a big box, carried it back to my desk, and began going through it. I was about halfway through the pile when Heller came back.

  “Bobbsey,” Heller said.

  “Bobbsey?”

  “Dani’s password was Bobbsey.”

  I remembered her sister, Christine, telling me: “We used to call ourselves the Bobbsey Twins. Then we grew apart as we got older.” Except Dani had never forgotten.

  I logged on to her computer, punching in her name and then Bobbsey as the password. It worked. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for, but I figured I’d know as soon as I found it. As it turned out, that didn’t take long. There was a folder listed in her documents titled THE GALLAGHER MURDERS.